Why No Red Wave? What Next?

One can argue that Trump cost Republicans the last three elections. His controversial presidential style while failing to fix health care helped Democrats take over the House in 2018. He lost the Covid-infused election of 2020, along with both Senate and House. This time, Trump-backed Senate candidates lost in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, giving Democrats the Senate again. And Georgia may follow. Trump’s larger-than-life stature cuts both ways.

Now Trump again wants the White House. Republicans had the issues (except abortion, which fired up pro-choice women). What will 2022 now teach the GOP?
 

Mark Antony (facial reconstruction)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” 

— Marc Antony, “Julius Caesar”, Act 3 Scene 2

1. Dump Trump? 

Peggy Noonan (former George H.W. Bush speechwriter):

What I am seeing is the end of something. I am seeing yesterday. This is a busted jalopy that runs on yesteryear’s resentments. A second term of this would be catastrophic, with him more bitter, less competent, surrounded by collapsed guardrails. He and his people once tried to stop the constitutionally mandated electoral vote certification by violently overrunning the U.S. Capitol. If America lets him back, he will do worse. And America knows. [T]he man himself poisons his own movement.


2. Dump Never Trumpers?

Roger Kimball (New Criterion editor and publisher):

Is Peggy Noonan back in the driver’s seat? As a paid-up member of the establishment, Noonan has long been a Trump opponent. Megyn Kelly said that were Trump to run in 2024, he would crush any opponent, including Ron DeSantis. “You really think the hardcore MAGA is going to abandon Trump for DeSantis?” Kelly asked. “They’re not. They like DeSantis. But they don’t think it’s his turn.” Moreover, she said, Trump’s backers “think DeSantis owes his political career to Trump. . . . They would never cross Trump for DeSantis.”

Joe Biden dismisses [Trump’s agenda] as “MAGA.” But .   .   . “MAGA” means “Make America Great Again.” It is a populist slogan. [I]t meant tax cuts, a booming stock market, bringing jobs back to America, rising wages at the lower end of the scale, historically low unemployment, especially minority unemployment, a secure border, energy independence, standing up to China, and peace in the Middle East.  It also meant an attack on the administrative state, over-regulation, climate-change fanaticism, political correctness, globalist imperatives, and foreign adventurism.  

 

Victor Davis Hanson (Stanford’s Hoover Institution):

 [T]he Republican Party.   .   . was shrinking and offered the Left an easy stereotype of a small club of aristocratic white corporate elites. Trump [recalibrated] the party. He demanded toughness with China, attacked illegal immigration, addressed the crisis of the deindustrialized American interior, and adopted a Jacksonian foreign policy[, all while] embracing Republican policies of low-taxes, small-government, deregulation, traditional values, and originalist justices.

[With] his furious counterassault against a vicious administrative state, bankrupt media, and crazed elite bicoastal class, Trump .   .   . ended up exposing and discrediting them all. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which monitors media coverage, found .   .   .Trump was the subject of the most biased coverage in modern presidential history. [The media] committed suicide through its hysteria and fixations. Trump’s “fake news” attacks .   .   .  resonated precisely because he was correct that the media had become utterly corrupt and a mere extension of the progressive project. 

In its politicized efforts to get Trump, the FBI blew up its reputation as a competent, professional, and disinterested investigatory bureau.   .   . his enemies .   .   .  weaponized the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department.

Trump, unlike Obama, did not spy on journalists. [His] supporters did not [seek] to junk the Electoral College, pack the court, destroy the filibuster, or opportunistically add two new states. They did not radically change the voting laws through means that undermined the authority of state legislatures to end Election Day as we had known it for over three centuries. They did not turn balloting into mostly a mail-in/early voting phenomena that saw the usual rejection rate of ballots plummet even as the number of non-Election Day ballots soared.
 

3. Not Trump, Incumbency’s Power  

Daniel McCarthy (editor Modern Age: A Conservative Review):

incumbents won last Tuesday no matter what their ideological tilt — not a single sitting senator or governor lost. Moderate Republican incumbents like Ohio’s Mike DeWine won; liberal Democrat incumbents like Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and New York governor Kathy Hochul won; libertarian-leaning Trump-friendly Republican incumbents like senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul won; and DeSantis himself, the right-wing incumbent governor of Florida, won.

I was as wrong as everyone else about the mood of the electorate. Midterms usually see big gains by the party out of power in the White House, and amid inflation and rising crime, the Democrats seemed to be doomed.   .   . The country responded to all the uncertainty and misery of recent times not by gambling on change but by sticking with incumbents of both parties and all ideological complexions. The public chose to punt on making decisions this election.    .    .
 

4. Cease Being Outspent, Out-organized, Outvoted 

J.D. Vance (Ohio Senator-elect):

any effort to blame Trump .    .    . ignores a major structural advantage for Democrats: money. Money is how candidates fund the all-important advertising that reaches swing voters, and it’s how candidates fund turnout operations. And in every marquee national race, Republicans got crushed financially.

ActBlue is the Democrats’ national fundraising platform, where 21 million individual donors shovel small donations into every marquee national race. ActBlue is why my opponent ran nonstop ads about how much he “agreed with Trump.”  

Republican small dollar fundraising efforts are paltry by comparison, and Republican fundraising efforts suffer from high consultant and “list building” fees—where Republicans pay a lot to acquire small-dollar donors. This is why incumbents have such massive advantages. [W]hen I run for reelection, [money] will go directly to my campaign. Democrats .   .   . raise more money from more donors, with lower overhead. 

[With cheaper TV rates for candidates, GOP] “Super PACs” $10 million .   .   .  is less efficient than $2 million spent by a campaign. So long as Republicans lose so badly in the small dollar fundraising game, Democrats will have a massive structural advantage. 

because ActBlue diverts resources to competitive races, this structural advantage can be magnified.   .   . In competitive [Senate races], every non-incumbent candidate was swamped with cash by national Democrats.   .   . The house tells a similar story. Every person blaming Trump [should] show a single national marquee race where a non-incumbent beat a well-funded opponent.

[Also, active] suburban whites especially are just more and more Democratic. Meanwhile, a lot of the Trump base just doesn’t turn out in midterm elections. [Before,] most of them voted for Democrats.   .   . Now, the shoe is on the other foot.   .   . exacerbated by Democrats’ strong advantages in states that have expanded vote by mail. 

[We need] voting reform. [We need] to build a turnout machine[. But] without organized labor and amid declining church attendance[, that] is no small thing. Our party has one major asset[:] Trump. Now, more than ever, our party needs Trump’s leadership to turn these voters out and suffers for his absence from the stage. 

 

Praise Caesar, Move Forward?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J.D. Vance says Trump leadership will “turn [the needed] voters out.” The challenge facing Ron DeSantis is to prove he can do everything, every single thing, Trump would do. DeSantis shows that he — not Trump — will be the populist who Makes America Great Again.